with Dr. Sunaina Maira, Professor of Asian American Studies, University of California – Davis

The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) has expanded rapidly though controversially in the United States in the last five years. The academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions is a key component of this movement. What is this boycott? Why does it make sense? And why is this an American Studies issue? In this short essential book, Sunaina Maira addresses these key questions. Boycott! situates the academic boycott in the broader history of boycotts in the United States as well as in Palestine and shows how it has evolved into a transnational social movement that has spurred profound intellectual and political shifts. It explores the movement’s implications for antiracist, feminist, queer, and academic labor organizing and examines the boycott in the context of debates about Palestine, Zionism, race, rights-based politics, academic freedom, decolonization, and neoliberal capitalism.

Sunaina Maira is Professor of Asian American Studies and was Co-Director of the Mellon Research Initiative in Comparative Border Studies at UC Davis from 2015-2018. In addition to Boycott! The Academy and Justice for Palestine, she is the author of several books on Muslim, Arab, and South Asian youth culture and activism including Jil Oslo: Palestinian Hip Hop, Youth Culture, and the Youth Movement and The 9/11 Generation: Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror. She co-edited Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America, which won the American Book Award, and The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent. Her current research is a community-engaged project on sanctuary activism and migrant solidarity movements in the US and Europe. Maira has also been involved with various community organizations and Palestine solidarity campaigns in the Bay Area and nationally.

This February, join USCPR and the Dream Defenders by showing solidarity with all the radical voices that continue to be silenced for speaking up against injustice, from the US to Palestine.On January 4, 2019, bowing to pressure from Zionist members of the Birmingham community, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI) voted to rescind its decision to bestow its highest honor, the Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award, on renowned Black scholar and activist Angela Davis. Dr. Davis is the latest in a long line of Black internationalist voices to be attacked for their support of Palestine.

Leaders like Dr. Davis are targeted because they articulate the connections between global systems of oppression bearing down on Indigenous, Black, brown, queer, and other marginalized communities. They recognize that white supremacy, settler colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy all reinforce each other and cannot be fought in isolation. Work for justice for one community must be part of a vision of justice for all.

“Black solidarity with Palestine allows us to understand the nature of contemporary racism more deeply.” – Angela Davis

Since the BCRI’s decision to revoke the Shuttlesworth Award was announced, there has been an outpouring of support for Dr. Davis from progressives and activists across movements. The BCRI has reconsidered its decision, and a diverse, intergenerational cross-section of grassroots and community leaders in Birmingham announced an alternative public event to honor Dr. Davis on February 16, the day she was supposed to receive the BCRI award.

Join us in honoring Dr. Angela Davis and the uncompromising ideals with which she has fought injustice.

Here are some actions you can take this February to show your solidarity with Angela Davis, Black internationalists, and the Palestinian people:

Visit Freedom-Bound.org, an artistic and historical account of the shared, interconnected struggle for collective liberation inspired by the rich legacy of Black-Palestinian solidarity.

Read Freedom is a Constant Struggle, in which Angela Davis reflects on the importance of Black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism, contextualizing these struggles within the framework of global struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement, from Ferguson to Palestine. Better yet – start a book club! We’ve got two free chapters and a study guide to get you started.

Get involved! Find local actions and organizations geared towards decriminalizing Black youth, demilitarizing law enforcement, and abolishing prisons as we know them, through the Movement for Black Lives. Check out Stop Urban Shield and No Cop Academy for examples of actions that you can take to oppose the police militarization which aims to repress Black youth and other marginalized communities.

Bring the conversation of Palestinian justice to your congregation. You can plug into a collaborative project designed to train congregations on how to implement a learning plan at Journeys Toward Justice.

Attend or host a Shabbat in solidarity with Angela Davis on February 15. Read from the Torah of Angela Davis and commit to reinvigorating a vibrant spirit of Black and Jewish solidarity. Share your event with #ShabbatWithAngelaDavis and favorite quotes with #TorahOfAngelaDavis.

Show your solidarity on social media by downloading and sharing the graphics below. Sample language that you could use: #IStandWithAngelaDavis because she stands for Black liberation, Palestinian rights, and freedom, justice, and equality for all.

Every year, the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC sponsors an all-expense paid trip for Congressional members, seeking to bolster support for Israel. In most recent years, the Democratic trip has been led by Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer (MD-5). Incoming Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (CA-32) is expected to lead the Republican delegation.

These junkets gloss over the daily, decades-long pervasive violation of Palestinian’s rights by the Israeli government. They serve as a platform for the Israeli government to present its views unchallenged. AIPAC and the Israeli government prioritize new legislators, hoping to influence their formative views.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (MI-13), who is the first Palestinian-American woman elected to Congress announced last month that she will not participate in this one-sided propaganda trip. Instead, she plans to lead a competing delegation on a tour of the West Bank.

Well, it seems this is not sitting well with several of her colleagues, who consider it dangerously presumptuous of a Palestinian-American woman to lead a delegation to her family’s home.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., told Al-Monitor this week that he’s against a West Bank delegation.

“Instead of her talking about things, she’s new here, she ought to listen and learn and open her mind and then come to some conclusions,” Engel told Al-Monitor. “If you’re going to be close-minded and have your views, no one’s going to change her views. But I would hope that once you’re elected to Congress, you would at least care to see the other side of the coin.” — www.al-monitor.com/…

Official Congressional delegations must be approved by the House speaker or the chair of a committee the Representative sits on. Though Rep. Tlaib isn’t on Rep. Engel’s committee, since he sits on Foreign Affairs, his views carry weight with others. Rep. Tlaib knows this.

Yo @RepEliotEngel, how are we ever going to obtain peace? I hope youÃ¢ÂÂll come with me on the trip to listen and learn. My sity (grandmother) will welcome you with an embrace & love. Please feel free to call me if you have anything to say. I am your colleague now.

Allowing some properties and attractions to be listed as being in “Israel”, as Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia and TripAdvisor do, not only deceives users, but also helps conceal information that can help reveal the illegal nature of the settlements.

In this report Amnesty International exposes how four leading online tourism companies and global brands — TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Expedia and Airbnb — are listing places to stay or things to do in illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

They are promoting these listings, and profiting from them, despite knowing that these Israeli settlements are illegal under international law and are at the root of a wide range of human rights violations suffered by Palestinian communities.

Amnesty International is calling on these companies to stop providing these listings, and on governments around the world to take regulatory action to prevent companies such as these from doing business in or with Israel’s illegal settlements.

WASHINGTON — Several prominent veteran Democrats, alarmed by the party’s drift from its longstanding alignment with Israel, are starting a new political group that will try to counter the rising skepticism on the left toward the Jewish state by supporting lawmakers and candidates in 2020 who stand unwaveringly with the country.

With polls showing that liberals and younger voters are increasingly less sympathetic to Israel, and a handful of vocal supporters of Palestinian rights arriving in Congress, the new group — the Democratic Majority for Israel — is planning to wage a campaign to remind elected officials about what they call the party’s shared values and interests with one of America’s strongest allies.

“Most Democrats are strongly pro-Israel and we want to keep it that way,” said Mark Mellman, the group’s president and a longtime Democratic pollster. “There are a few discordant voices, but we want to make sure that what’s a very small problem doesn’t metastasize into a bigger problem.”

The group, whose board includes former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm and a former Clinton administration housing secretary, Henry Cisneros, will create a political action committee later this year and may engage in Democratic primaries, Mr. Mellman said. They also are planning an “early states project” with the goal of organizing pro-Israel Democrats in the first nominating states to lobby the party’s presidential hopefuls.

For many traditional Democratic supporters of Israel, there is a deepening concern that voters in America’s two major political parties appear to be moving apart in how they view the country.

As Republican backing for Israel surges thanks to the rise of evangelicals in their coalition and President Trump’s close alignment with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an increasingly liberal Democratic Party is growing more uneasy with a country they see as an oppressor of a marginalized group, the Palestinians.

The shift on Israel reflects the larger Democratic tilt toward a brand of leftist politics that is creating tensions between the party’s old guard and an ascendant progressive wing that has been emboldened by Mr. Trump’s inflammatory politics and the perceived compromises and failures of an earlier generation of moderates.

While the overwhelming majority of congressional Democrats are strong supporters of Israel, the party’s pro-Israel wing has been jolted by election of a pair of high-profile freshman, Representatives Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, who support the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against the country.

Ms. Omar was appointed to a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which drew scorn from Republicans but offers her a prominent perch in the debate over Middle East policy. And Ms. Tlaib drew widespread attention earlier this month when somebody in her office placed a Post-it note that read “Palestine” over Israel on a map in her office.

But they are hardly alone among the newer Democratic lawmakers in taking, at least, a more nuanced view of Israel. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York has called the “occupation of Palestine” a humanitarian crisis, and other progressives like Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington have not hesitated to criticize Israel’s use of force against Palestinian protesters.